Ericsson has announced the acquisition of San Francisco-based data center automation startup NodePrime, in a bid to boost its cloud offering and enhance its presence in the next-generation software-defined data center market.
NodePrime emerged last September after the company raised $7 million in seed funding from Ericsson, Menlo Ventures, NEA, Formation 8, Initialized Capital, Crosslink Capital and TEEC Angel Fund.
NodePrime’s infrastructure management platform is designed to support the command and control of the ecosystem of components in data centers. Ericsson is said to already use the service internally before NodePrime emerged from stealth.
Financial terms of the deal were not disclosed but it will see Ericsson gain full control of NodePRime, including 15 staff, which will be integrated into the vendor’s Cloud & IP business unit.
Ericsson said it has already integrated NodePrime’s software platform into its Hyperscale Datacenter System 8000 .The platform enables discovery, analysis and automated configuration of existing and new data center hardware platforms, allowing data centers to become hyperscale and adopt distributed infrastructure, Ericsson said in a statement.
By acquiring Nodeprime's competence, Ericsson will reduce sourcing risk and secure control of roadmap direction and acceleration, the company added.
“NodePrime has unique talent and was a clear choice to bring inside Ericsson,” said Anders Lindblad, vice president and head of Cloud & IP business unit at Ericsson.
“We believe in innovation coming from the Silicon Valley area and will continue to increase our presence and distribution of such innovation"
"Our vision from the start was to transform the infrastructure into a single entity where it's entirely possible to grasp the management of hyperscale data center infrastructure through the collection of trillions of associated metrics inside one view,” said James Malachowski, co-founder and CEO of NodePrime.
"Together [with Ericsson] we are creating a massive power shift for enterprises to make decisions on their own terms and scale with precision at the speed at which businesses need to respond today."
The acquisition is Ericsson’s latest push into the cloud computing and data center technology market. Ericsson, which has joined the Open Compute Project this year, recently announced a global business, technology and services alliance with Amazon Web Services (AWS) to accelerate cloud transformation for telecoms service providers.
The company has also grabbed a number of deals with telcos - including DoCoMo, Telstra, XL Axiata and LG Uplus - on cloud, SDN and NFV.